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Rewiring marketing: a practice based approach
Dr T R Madan Mohan* and Nupoor Sinha**
*Dr TR Madan Mohan is Managing partner, Browne & Mohan,
** Nupoor Sinha, is Senior Assistant Consultant (Marketing and Strategy), Browne & Mohan.
Images used are owned by respective copyright owners.

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Introduction
Today, many businesses are taking a leap forward on adopting Facebook, Instagram, and also increasing
investing in awards and events. However, their marketing departments are under pressure to quantity the
outcomes and impacts. CEO are disenchanted with the marketing spend us it just seem to be good at
making noise with no real impact on the customer base or pipeline. Companies spend a fortune on the
conferences and events but the outcomes belie expectations. It is not surprising for many companies find
75% of the participants who attended their events came for free lunch. Corporate gifts, industry exhibitions
cost a dime, and yet ineffective. Albeit companies continue to pursue many of these acts they are afraid to
pause and question fundamentals. Studies across industry indicate:
1) 50% of marketing budget is totally wasted
2) Only 34% of feel their content marketing works
3) 25% had no marketing strategy
4) 44% had no alignment between various marketing media
Many marketing managers are not aware if they are leveraging marketing efforts correctly or getting the
returns that they anticipated. Some believe in only the physical networking events and other lean heavily
on social media platforms. Common problem associated with marketing include:
 What is the best marketing mix,
 offline and online that would complement each other
 How to leverage social media and analytics to support pipeline
 How to make social media relevant to every department
 How to build and monitor listening
 How to leverage and involve customers and employees in planning and execution
 How to maximize brand awareness and stickiness.
Often people believe transforming marketing is all about creating some digital assets like Facebook or
Linkedin or have couple of video’s on Youtube. While these are key tools to market your products and
services, marketing transformation is not piece meal improvement. Rewiring marketing must lead to better
understanding of customer and improve revenue by serving manifested and latent demands. Marketing
transformation must lead to a unified, contextual rich, many-to-many content driven communication
providing insight, platform to engage and identify opportunities for business to experiment. The primary
purpose of a marketing transformation is to increase the ROI of marketing your company.
AOI: practice based framework
So how can companies ensure their marketing dollars are well spent and drive intended outcome. On the
outset, it is important to realize marketing function serves three fundamental objectives: inform, influence
and advocacy. Any marketing activity is to help consumers know about the brand, differentiate it from
competition and seek higher revenues. Companies use various marketing assets to communicate to the
interest group their unique existence, product/service offering set, pricing and other advantages.
Companies use several approaches to drive influence. Celebrity endorsements, awards, directed online
community influencer marketing is all effective mediums of influencing consumers. Advocacy is the
process of harnessing experiences of several customers to power your campaigns and engagement
strategies. Corporate ambassadors, MVP’s, campus warriors are different approaches companies use to
create an authentic and human connection centric marketing to drive positive words of mouth.
Rewiring marketing starts with a vision, what is that needs to be achieved. Setting a clearly defined scope
and context is the key for marketing improvements. Goals, both short term and long term, how the
activities at each stage and across groups are connected and lead to the next broader goals need explicit
enunciation. Assessing current organizational capabilities, customer expectations and engagements (both
internal and external) is critical to define value levers of marketing function improvements. It is neither
desirable nor practical to completely overhaul systems and procedures to implement marketing function

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improvement program. While considering improvements think of a bimodal mode: one to sustain current
operational requirement of the business and other that brings agility for future business requirement.
Browne & Mohan consultants have derived a practices based 3 step methodology in order to shape a
robust value creation strategy for our clients. This framework is time tested, empirically proven and offers
results. With hierarchy of objectives and key results (OKR) model as the underlying framework, our
marketing transformation approach is integrative, and paced well with the objectives of the company.
The first step involves conducting a comprehensive “as-is process marketing maturity audit”. This helps to
identify current marketing activities, underlying processes, gaps and scope for improvement. This
encompasses evaluating the current service levels in two phases. One from an internal customer
perspective, what is the expectation of these customers, how these are met, what is the organization,
consistency of communication and content, communication quality and impact, etc. Second, is from
external customer perspective, mix of marketing assets used, marketing communication strategies used,
content & knowledge management approaches, etc.
The second phase is optimization of the marketing function. What works best is when companies know
how to mesh mash both physical and online assets and the assets within each category. One strategy that
could be effectively followed is to have a quarter-wise marketing plan aligned to sales expectations. Then
follow up a “embellish” strategy where in the messaging starts from basic assets and progresses to high
scale assets. The advantage of this is that content development and curate can happen in stages and
stronger stories and messaging merge. When planning for marketing, consider the complete assets at your
disposal and build a embellish strategy that improves reach and richness of marketing communication
complementing sales.
Different marketing assets serve different purpose and effective at different stages of sales cycle. Assets
such as breakfast meeting facilitates more personalized one on one discussion that may be more effective
in later stages of sales cycle. On the other hand, assets like newsletter or blog may be more useful in the
early stages of sales cycle. Marketing assets also vary by their cost and impact. Some of these cost a dime
and more effective to lock-in, while some may be low cost approaches to increase reach only.
Create awareness through push marketing techniques including e-mails, newsletters, social media
advertising, physical advertising mediums including events, conferences etc. Ensure website has enough
call to action appeal and open contact channels. From a sales side, once the consumer expresses his/her
interest we should feed information to evaluate our services/products. Purchase decision require high
impacting demos, product demonstration, virtual try-on’s and one-on-one walk through. Post purchase

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requires marketing channels to receive customer feedback, strengthening relationships and use this
opportunity to cross-sell/ offer additional services/getting recommendations/references.
It is important to realize sales motions differ across segments within a company. Segments vary on the
“value” of purchase and sales may have different approaches to interact and influence customers. Order
qualifying criteria may not be just enough in that segment. Marketing must be able to push the company
over to order winning plateau. Marketing platforms must facilitate experience sharing and credibility
reinforcing cures for direct sales to influence and close deals. Thought leadership vehicles including
standards, industry frameworks and innovation ideas fly well in face to face meetings with the customers.
Breakfast meetings, Industry association, standard setting bodies, and Knowledge sharing conferences
serve as valuable platforms for direct sales to position the company at state of art knowledge. These
platforms allow discussions to be personalized and centred on solving the problems the clients face, hence
meeting service immediacy. On the other hand, a low value low engagement segment may need a
consistent and continuous campaign policy. Mail them a newsletter, case studies and customer wins to
increase awareness about your brand.
Marketing transformation execution, the third stage requires deployment of company-wide process and
system changes with common objectives and measures for both business and functional outcome. Define
a clear roll out plan is defined with key change owners at every level, milestones and time frames. A
continuous review mechanism with appropriate incentives for driving change at all levels is required, think
of some gamification to involve content contribution from insiders and customers too. The end goal would
be to continuously assess and refine at all levels.
Measuring marketing efforts in terms of the outputs, outcomes and impact is crucial to marketing
transformation. Most often companies measure the outputs of marketing team which may be in the form
of number of blogs/ Facebook posts/ Awards etc. However, we ignore the value this output in terms of its
quality and longevity. Companies can realize better return on investments in their sales and marketing
when these functions are congruent and well-coordinated. Congruency can be gained by ensuring same
goals drive their quarterly activities, common goals entwine both functions at various levels and incentives
encourage them to support each other. Coordination improves when event plans, promos, content
marketing and other assets are aligned with sales motions.
Awarenesss
Interest
EvaluatePurchase
Post
Purchase
1. E-Mails
2. Newsletters
3. Social media
4. Events, conferences
1. Website
2. Email
1. Expertise- Blogs, White Papers, Case
Studies
2. Experience- Number of Customers,
Number of Reviews
3. Credibility- Awards, Analyst Reports
1. Product Demonstrations
2. One on one walkthroughs
1. Customer Feedback
2. Strengthen Relationship
3. Offer Additional Services

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What must you remember when rewiring Marketing
Our marketing improvement programs experience has taught us few do’s which are presented below.
Do’s
 Planning is key to marketing success, plan well and execute faster
Have a 2quarter marketing plan aligned to sales to define broad directions
 Run a fortnightly marketing sprint to ensure productivity is high
 Tinker monthly plans and activities to meet current requirements
 Not all marketing assets may work, do not invest time in fad, prioritize
 Consistency is key, stick to day of the week and hour of the day plan for FB or even Instagram
 Smart extension and reuse is a must
 Do not be limited by outputs of your team, enlarge partners across the organization & outside
 Interns and freelancers bring a lot of value, if they could be directed well
 Content Marketing improvement that deepens end customer visibility has high payoff
 Create process, product and change owners at all levels
 Top management team has to consistently create the sense of urgency
 Keep challenging the assumptions, ask for data,
 Improvements can be obtained through outsourcing that yields quick & significant impact, but
direction and control are key to quality of outcomes
 Hold weekly reviews with the partners
 Experiment often, reuse often
 Look at both organic and inorganic analytics about customers.
 Improvisation is a continuous process and sometimes it is necessary to tweak certain areas after
the implementation has been done.
Bibliography
Adele Sweetwood, The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization, SAS Institute,
2016.
Amy Gallo, Refresher on Marketing ROI, Harvard Business Review, July 2017
James D Lenskold, Marketing ROI, American Marketing Association, 2004.
John Doerr, Measuring what matters, Penguin, 2018
Rossi Patricia and Krey Nina (Eds), Marketing Transformation: Marketing Practice in an Ever changing
World, Proceedings of the 2017 Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, 2018.
Scott Brinker, Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative,
Wiley, 2016
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